Babel Clash

Ooh, ooh, a subject on which we can agree (no, not that I look like a male prostitute from Fable) but that the death of Aerith in FF7 was a great moment.  I walked around open-mouthed for hours.  Then I cried, and cried, and cried.  Then the denial.  Then the anger.  Then I cried, and I cried, and I cried again.  Then the denial.  It was a tough couple of years.

Bioshock?  Yeah, meh, I dunno, I liked it, don’t get me wrong, but although it was a beautifully rendered setting and the deco styling and all was very cool, I found it was a bit of a mediocre and rather claustrophobic shooter under the skin, and from all the hype I’d been expecting all kinds of clever moral choices and character advancement, and didn’t really find much of the sort.  You make a good point, actually, about the paucity of games with any kind of genuine moral depth.  I remember when Black & White was hailed as a revolution in gaming, a god-game in which the world would supposedly alter to reflect YOUR personality.  It bore the tagline, “find out who you are”.  But when it came down to it the only real option seemed to be a simple choice between “very bored” and “extremely bored”.  Fable and its sequels, though good games, are others in which I don’t necessarily feel the moral depth.  Likewise inFamous, which I’ve been playing recently, gives you the opportunity to run the entire moral spectrum from really evil to really good, with none of the stages in between, although at least it doesn’t lay claim to any particular sophistication.

Ironically, those games that trumpet their moral complexity often seem to be the simplest of all, and often are the least flexible plot-wise.  Maybe it’s the attempts to somehow ‘quantify’ morality, to reward it or not reward it.  I find the morality is often more interesting in games that are much more open-ended.  You mention Fallout 3.  I was a big fan of the original Fallout games way back in the 17th century and, not being a huge fan of Oblivion (I like it, but find certain elements execrable), I was watching through one eye to see how Bethesda Studios messed up a really innovative and interesting (though long-dead) franchise.  I thought they succeeded brilliantly, and blogged about it at tedious length.  Hugely varied, hugely atmospheric, and with a good sense of humour too (almost as rare in computer games as it is in American fantasy authors - Zing!)

Morgan’s question about what one would like to write a tie-in for brought to mind a game I left out - Thief.  Surely one of the most atmospheric and scary of all first-person games, with a superbly dark and rich fantasy world, and probably the most successful sneaking game ever done.  Stealth in computer games, like morality, is often talked up but very rarely done well…

Ah, Brent, Brent, Brent.  Your parting shots remind me of someone.  Who is it?  Ah, yes, it’s this guy, on the canvas.

But let us set aside our differences (particularly the massive difference between my amazing arguing ability and your frankly quite poor one) and concentrate instead on computer games.  I’ve been a keen gamer for pretty much all my life, from being captivated by big blocks of falling pixels on the black and white tv we had attached to our 2K Acorn Atom to pummelling Medieval Total War on my PC or inFamous on my PS3.  I’d have to say though that even today computer games aren’t always the most interestingly plotted things around, which makes anything surprising or unusual pretty interesting.  Often those that are more or less open-ended (like Elite on the BBC Micro, greatest single game of all time, no doubt, or Sim City or Civilisation, or the aforementioned Total War, all games into which I have poured literally months of my life) and can be played in many different ways are the most interesting.  Ones that actually have good stories tend, for me, to fall into the roleplaying camp.  Casting my mind far back, a game called Legend on the Atari ST blew my mind at the time because it had a very nice twist in the plot.  Probably not spoiling anything if I say the goodly King who sends your adventuring band on their quest turns out to be the villain.  Baldur’s Gate (and its sequels) was a later classic, which was one of the first games I played that really seemed to have a sense of humour in the dialogue options, and felt like a truly huge game world to explore.  Indeed the developer Bioware who were responsible for that, for Neverwinter Nights and Knights of the Old Republic among many others, have always been some of the best and most interesting storytellers in the gaming business, for me.  Final Fantasy games, though frequently incomprehensible, also manage often to involve me closely, especially number 7, which quite blew my mind when it first came to the UK, and managed to wring quite a lot of raw emotion from some really rubbish sprites…

Man, I could be here all day, but come on, dig up some of your own…